Euthanasia / Assisted Suicide - Archive

Peaceful Pill Promoted by Nitschke Australian Founder of Suicide Group Exit (2006)

Philip Nitschke, an Australian doctor who promotes suicide as a way to die has introduced a new “peaceful pill” plan to advocates at a conference, touting the pill for its accessibility – and legality.

In a report on Canadian Television, Dr. Philip Nitschke of Exit International said that his plan allows for the self-appointed date with death he advocates. “If you can manage things yourself you don’t break laws,” he said about the instructions in his book on the subject. The book describes a lethal barbiturate concoction that acts by depressing the central nervous system, and observers say it appears similar to drugs used in the few countries where euthanasia is allowed.

In Australia, Nitschke is faced with a law that prohibits even giving how-to consultations on suicide and he has moved his group’s website to New Zealand to avoid that conflict.

In Canada, a proposal to allow assisted suicide died at the conclusion of a recent Parliament, and in the United States, only one state, Oregon, now allows physicians to prescribe medications to be used for suicide. Nitschke said that volunteers with his organization donated several thousand dollars to assemble a lab at a New South Wales farm where they were able to put the drug into a crystalline form.

Nitschke, who has been discussing the concept of such a pill for several years, said 100 people already are waiting to use it…Focus analysts, however, argue that this was the same way that the Nazi extermination of groups of people began: first with the old and infirm, then the handicapped, and eventually entire blocks of people just because they belonged to that group.

In the U.S., Vermont at one point considered the “Death With Dignity Act” and California has reviewed a plan, but Oregon’s physician-assisted suicide plan has been approved by the courts. [14Sept06, WorldNetDaily.com; LifeSiteNews.com; http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=51969]

Euthanasia radicals are always trying to pretend that all they want is access to assisted suicide for the terminally ill in unbearable pain for whom nothing can be done to alleviate suffering.

This is a false premise, of course. But it is not the true agenda, which is really about eventually getting to the place of near death on demand.

Proof of this assertion can be found in the ongoing World Federation of Right to Die Societies Convention in Toronto.

One of the prime presenters at the conference is Australian physician and euthanasia absolutist Philip Nitschke, who was paid thousands of dollars by the Hemlock Society (now merged into the euphemistically named Compassion and Choices) to develop the “peaceful pill,” a suicide concoction that is designed to allow ready access to suicide for those who live in countries where assisted suicide and euthanasia are illegal.